


Aunt Peggy's Home for the Poorly Parented

by betheflame



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Aunt Peggy Carter, BAMF Peggy Carter, Gen, Howard Stark's A+ Parenting, POV Peggy Carter, Tony Stark Has A Heart, Tony Stark Needs a Hug, Wakes & Funerals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-04
Updated: 2020-01-04
Packaged: 2021-02-27 13:15:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,818
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22117744
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/betheflame/pseuds/betheflame
Summary: Peggy Carter never wanted to be a mother, but she ended up raising a generation instead.
Relationships: Peggy Carter & Tony Stark
Comments: 32
Kudos: 194





	Aunt Peggy's Home for the Poorly Parented

**Author's Note:**

> This idea's been knocking around my head for a while - after a tweet I saw saying that it would be cool if Tony, Hope, and Sharon had all grown up together under Aunt Peggy's watchful eye. I don't know enough about Sharon or Hope to fully fold them in here, but I couldn't shake the ideas of how different Tony's life would have been if Peggy had been at his six, as it were. 
> 
> My beloved HogwartsToAlexandria informs me the the result is both tear-jerking and lovely. Let me know if you agree with her, will ya?

* * *

In the summer of 1970, Peggy Carter wanted many things. Of course there were the obligatory global asks - world peace, etc. - but she had some personal ones as well. Permanent funding for SHIELD, for one, but also for the _New Dick Van Dyke_ show to be as good as the original. She wanted health and happiness for all her friends, Edward Heath to not stay Prime Minister of the United Kingdom for very long (not that Harold Wilson was any better, but, honestly… Heath?), and she had her eye on a Chanel handbag that she was planning on acquiring for both herself and Maria for Christmas.

But of all the things on her long list, a child was not one of them.

She had known motherhood wasn’t for her from a very early age. She had never played with dolls the way she was ‘supposed to’, or been overly concerned with finding a permanent fella. She was careful - even the one or two times she had been with Steve had been halted long before pregnancy had been a concern - and she was a realist. If she wanted to be part of something big, something that could help make sure that people like Zola would never again get the resources they needed to ruin the world, then sacrifices had to be made.

Besides - Margaret Carter was feared within the intelligence world. Why would Peggy jeopardize that with something she wasn’t going to be particularly _good_ at?

So no, Peggy Carter never wanted children.

And then Howard and Maria had a son.

And Tony Stark - as he would do for so many others - changed her entire life.

She had never been quite sure of Maria Carbonel as a choice for Howard. By the time he introduced the gorgeous Italian to Peggy, they’d been friends for nigh on 20 years and if there was anyone on the planet who knew Howard Stark, it was Peggy. For it was certainly not Howard himself.

By the time 1965 rolled around and Peggy was standing at the absurdly massive wedding, the Howard who had palled around with the Howlies was gone. Steve’s disappearance had started the cracks in the veneer, but the Manhattan Project had _destroyed_ her friend. To most of the world, he still appeared as the charming genius engineer who could save the world with a hair pin and glue if needed, but she knew better. The bitterness over his two most significant failures had given Howard edges that hadn’t been there in the trenches.

Maria was lovely, truly, but she didn’t have the backbone to withstand the writing on the wall. As Howard’s drinking increased, Peggy’s anxiety over her friend did as well.

And then Howard told her that Maria was expecting and Peggy nearly fainted.

Howard tried during Maria’s pregnancy to sober up, Peggy had to give him credit for that. When her godson was placed in her arms, Howard’s eyes were clear and bright and covered in a sheen of tears. She felt calmer that he was going to do what was best for this boy.

It worked for a few years, but Peggy could just feel the other shoe waiting to drop. Maria also proved a problem to be monitored as she increasingly abdicated responsibility of Tony’s care to others. There were also the photos of them that continued to show up in all the society pages - with suspiciously blown pupils and flushed cheeks.

So Peggy did what she did best. She handled it, making sure that Ana Jarvis - a housekeeper sent straight from the heavens themselves - had the telephone numbers and security codes of every single one of Peggy’s offices. (Ana even reached Peggy once while in a closed door meeting in the Oval Office). Peggy appointed herself to the Stark Industries Board of Directors and glared at anyone who claimed she had a conflict of interest.

_“I’m here as a voice for my godson, gentlemen,” she remarked with steel in her voice. “If the company is to be his, then I shall remain here until he can take his seat.”_

_“Mrs. Carter - “_

_“Director Carter,” she corrected, her eyes swinging quickly to the man who questioned her._

_“Director Carter,” he corrected himself with an edge of anger in his tone. “It is highly inappropriate for someone within the intelligence agency to serve on the board of a weapons manufacturer and government contractor. We will, of course, keep the boy’s company safe for him -”_

_He was cut off by the snort of laughter from Howard at the end of the table. All eyes swung to the founder and president. “First of all, the last several men who told Pegs she couldn’t do something are selling shoes in Piscataway, so please go ahead with your points, Jefferson. Second, the last thing any of you are concerned about is Tony. Your mandate isn’t to protect my family, it’s to provide profit margins for the shareholders. But allow me to remind you that I am still majority shareholder and Pegs actually holds the second largest piece besides myself. I say she stays and if you have a problem with that, have fun selling shoes.”_

_Peggy ignored the slight slur of his words and took her victory where she could get it. Tony’s company would be safe in her hands. She swore it._

Status quo was largely maintained. When Howard’s genius was fuzzy due to his … extracurricular activities, Peggy worked with the CEO - a misogynistic jackass named Jackson Oppenweiler - to make sure that the books were clean and the P&Ls were balanced and for the first four years of Tony’s life, everything was fine.

And then…

And then Tony was smarter than Howard.

And it all went to utter and complete shit.

Peggy would never forget the hushed phone call from Ana - Director Carter, I’m afraid Master Stark has lost his temper with Anthony and Missus Stark is unable to attend to him. Could you possibly come to the mansion after work? - that summoned her to the mansion that first time. She found Tony curled in a ball in his closet, wiring and rewiring a lamp to keep himself busy, tears silently rolling down his face.

_“What happened, chicken,” she said softly, as she crunched herself into the space._

_“Daddy got loud when I showed him the ‘puter, Aunt Peggy,” Tony sniffled softly. “I made it smaller than the one he bought me last month and I thought he’d be proud of me because if it’s smaller it should cost less to make and isn’t that what he’s always complaining about? How things keep getting more ‘spensive? I thought he’d be proud.”_

_She held her breath and Tony abandoned the lamp and scrambled into her lap. His giant brown eyes - her kryptonite on the best days - were full of unshed tears and Peggy could see the scratch on his cheek that she knew came from Howard’s signet ring. “He wasn’t proud, Aunt Peggy. He was loud.”_

Peggy herself had been raised in a ‘spare the rod, spoil the child’ world, but after the horrors of war and the day-to-day violence of her life, she couldn’t imagine how Howard justified physically punishing Tony for doing something so incredible. So once again, Peggy did what she did best.

She handled things.

It quickly became Aunt Peggy who went to Tony’s piano recitals with Maria, and who propped up her friend when the downers in her system were too strong to be overcome even with pride for her son. Birthdays may have been formally celebrated with the family and several distinguished guests, but Tony told Ana that all he really wanted was her, Jarvis, and Aunt Peggy. She tried valiantly to not have the Starks send Tony to boarding school, but she lost that battle and instead continued to mother him from afar. It got harder once the Jarvis’ each passed away - within six days of each other, no less - but she’d handled difficult situations before.

If SHIELD’s budget line for ‘Director Carter’s personal travel’ ballooned slightly from 1976-1984, no one dared say anything.

In the summer of 1980, Peggy Carter wanted many things. She desperately wanted Ronald Regan to not be elected President, and for all the hostages to be released from Iran. She loved watching _M*A*S*H_ and had high hopes for the new detective show, _Magnum P.I_. But more than anything, she wanted Tony to be happy and safe. She supposed she had become a mother after all.

Tony built her her own computer in 1981 that was at least fourteen times smaller than the one she’d been given by IBM. She was, therefore, basically unsurprised when he called and told her he was going to head to MIT a few years early.

_“And what do we mean by a few years, Anthony?”_

_She heard silence on the other end of the phone and then a quiet, “next year.”_

_“Next year! But you’ll be 14 years old, sweetheart. That feels -”_

_“Can you move to Boston for a few years, Aunt Peggy?”_

_The request took her out at her knees and she said ‘yes’ as her brain started spinning with setting up a Boston field office._

Things were precarious, however, and Peggy always walked a fine line between taking care of him and letting too many people know she was. If word got out in the business community that Howard was an alcoholic abuser, the shareholders of the early 1980s would not appreciate it. The Moral Majority was gaining ground and if there was going to be a Stark Industries for Tony to run, Peggy had to be careful.

So, should anyone ask why all of Tony’s school holidays were spent in her Brooklyn brownstone - suspiciously close to the recorded address of one Steven Grant Rogers prior to enlisting - instead of his parents’ West Chester mansion, the answer was simple: the boy loved the city. As long as Tony appeared occasionally and never mentioned his science or math grades, calm was generally maintained.

It didn’t hurt that by that point, Peggy’s house had become a catch-all for the poorly parented students of Phillips Exeter. Each vacation brought another student who desperately needed Peggy’s patented blend of inexhaustible love and firm guidance. Hope Van Dyne was first, and then the children of governors and emperors, of oil magnates and retail giants. She had a particular fondness for the English boy named Colin from the Surrey Firths that Tony brought early on, for he always showed up with her favorite childhood sweets from Marks & Spencers. Tony installed a keypad system on her backdoor so that anyone who knew the code could find home under her roof.

Margaret Carter had sworn up and down that she never wanted children, but it turned out she quite enjoyed helping to raise them.

The system she’d crafted for hiding Tony crumbled when the letter came from Phillips Exeter that Tony was to graduate at the tender age of 14 with a perfect GPA. Peggy braced herself, and knew some of the jig was up. Howard was furious with her when he found out how Peggy and Tony were “scheming”. Maria didn’t notice. By 1984, Maria wasn’t noticing much of anything.

_“Margaret he is my son!” Howard roared at her the following weekend._

_“Then you need to goddamn act like it, you bloody fool,” Peggy snapped. “That boy is the best thing that has ever happened to this family and you are ignoring him.”_

_“I’m making him strong,” Howard responded. “He doesn’t need your mollycoddling, Margaret. Just because you never found someone who didn’t fly a plane into the ocean to get away from you doesn’t mean -”_

_He was cut off when her hand slapped him straight across the face._

_“Do not ever,” Peggy growled, “use Steven’s decision or my feelings about Steven as some sort of… I love Anthony with my whole being, Howard, and you have no idea what you’re missing. He’s bright, and kind, and clever, and he would do credit to the Stark name if you would only let him.”_

_“He needs to toughen up,” Howard gave no indication that he felt any pain from the slap, which led Peggy to wonder how many bottles of Johnnie Walker he’d gone through that week. “If I turned anything over to him right now, he’d crumble under the pressure!”_

_“He is a child, you absolute bloody idiot!”_

_“He can be a child or a genius, Margaret, he doesn’t get to be both. You want to tell me he can invent circles around my best men, then he should be working. If you want to tell me he’s a child, then his inventions are useless. Which one do you want?”_

_Peggy could barely see through her tears of anger as she snapped, “I want you to love your son, Howard Edward. I want you to love him and fight for him the same way you fought for Steven and James. I want you to be as proud of him as you were of Steven. I see the money you spend, Howard, looking for him. Maybe spend less of that and more time with your actual, living, breathing, son.”_

_“Steve is my best work,” Howard replied._

_“Tony is your best work,” Peggy said, all the fight going out of her. “And my friend Howard that flew that plane to Azzano, he would know that.”_

_“Well, maybe that Howard is dead, Pegs, you ever think of that? War claims a lot of things,” Howard said, with a tone of defeat that nearly broke Peggy in half. When she wasn’t blindingly furious at him, she felt terrible for him._

_“Maybe somewhere in that fancy brain, you can think of a way to bring him back to life,” Peggy replied softly. “In the meantime, I’ll mind Tony, just like I have, and I’ll thank you to stay out of my way.”_

Howard signed over legal guardianship of Tony to Peggy to facilitate the move to Cambridge. She combed over the files of incoming freshmen to find a suitable roommate for Tony - he refused to live full-time with his spinster aunt, and she couldn’t say she blamed him. One particular file stood out - a Mr. James Rhodes of West Orange, New Jersey. Rhodes was an Air Force ROTC student who had already been accepted to the Air Force Academy, but was spending his first two years of college at MIT to specifically work in their aerospace robotics program. His recommendation letters were full of discussions about his character and leadership and how he was specifically gifted with working with students younger than he was who had lots of potential but minor discipline issues.

If that didn’t describe her Anthony…

And so, on the first weekend of the 1984-1985 school year, Peggy had Tony and James - _“No, Aunt Pegs, he goes by ‘Rhodey’"_ \- over for what would be the first of their many, many meals. Peggy taught the boys to make toad in a hole, Rhodey taught them both how to make his grandmother’s fried chicken and his Aunt Cathy’s lemon meringue pie. It was the closest thing to family that Tony had ever really known and Peggy swelled with pride at how he thrived.

Those first two years in Cambridge were idyllic, frankly, and saying goodbye to Rhodey when he moved to Colorado Springs was nearly as painful for Peggy as it was for Tony.

Tony completed his undergraduate work in two years, and then went straight into a dual masters program. He started his first PhD in 1988 and defended his thesis in the spring of 1990. And with every graduation, or certificate, or accolade, or published paper, or incredible breakthrough that had the entire university buzzing - Peggy could hear the yearning in his voice for his parents to be proud of him.

Anthony Edward Stark was the youngest graduate of every program he was in and all Howard Edward Stark managed to contribute to the process was “don’t get a big head about yourself”.

And with every graduation, or certificate, or accolade, Peggy saw more and more of her sweet, clever, and kind boy disappear into an angry, frustrated, impetuous teenager who was so desperate for his parents’ attention that he’d get it any way he could. The lab he had built for himself at the back of her property smelled more like vodka than oxygen and he was frequently stumbling into the main house at all hours with only a few items of clothing on. There were different people parading through their house and Peggy started hearing rumors that he had a bit of a reputation.

The problem was, by 1990, Peggy had her hands full with more than just mothering Tony. She felt like she was fighting a war on all fronts - the newest CEO of Stark Industries was a cretin she trusted no further than she could throw him, Obadiah Stane, plus she had been made permanent guardian of her seven-year-old niece Sharon after her sister and brother-in-law were tragically killed in a plane crash.

So while Peggy didn’t particularly like Tiberius Stone or Sunset Bain or Justin Hammer or any other of the entitled asshats Tony kept company with during that season of his life, she couldn’t _do_ anything about it.

They drifted, she wasn’t too proud to admit it. She learned more about her nephew from _Hello!_ and surreptitiously purchased copies of _Tiger Beat_ than she did from his own mouth. Holidays were perfunctory and his easy charm had a surly edge to it that she didn’t recognize.

As they both got older, he’d refer to these years as his Lost Boy years and Peggy as Wendy Darling - but neither of them knew that at the time. All Peggy knew was that when the phone rang on December 17th, 1991 at 1:14am, she had to spend every ounce of her energy getting him back.

She handled things, of course she did. She arranged for pallbearers and made Tony take a drug test before she’d allow him to do any press (took her years to forget the sight of her nephew urinating in front of her, but she was too tired for compassion and entirely too jaded for risk-taking). Once the bodies were buried, and the will was read, Tony informed Peggy that he was heading to his Manhattan penthouse and that he’d be in touch.

He was not in touch.

Instead, he was in the papers again and on the morning of the first official board meeting since the reading of the will and the transfer of stock, she decided that enough was enough.

She found him. He was exactly where she knew he’d be in the state she'd feared he'd be in.

For the first time since that horrible phone call three months earlier, she felt like crying.

“Anthony,” she said briskly as she snapped open the curtains.

“Aunt Peggy, that’s too bright,” the semi-comatose form of Tony Stark mumbled from his bed.

“Anthony Edward, you will remove yourself from that mattress and redress in the shower and you will do so immediately. You smell absolutely abominable and if you ever hope to bring anyone to this room again for sexual congress, you will possibly need an exterminator.”

“I don’t have anywhere to be,” he mumbled and turned back over.

She snapped the covers off the bed. “You have a company to run, Anthony.”

He sat up and scowled at her. “Stane can handle it.”

“And you’ll be doing exactly what instead,” she questioned. “Sleeping your way through the population of New York County?”

“Aw, you’re thinking too small, Aunt Pegs,” he smirked. “I’m well into West Chester County by now. May even dip into Suffolk, soon.”

She took three deep breaths and reminded herself that she loved this creature more than she loved her own soul. “You have a board meeting in two hours.”

“I’m not going,” Tony replied casually, reaching for some device on his bedside table. When the curtains began receding again she howled in frustration.

“Yes you are, Anthony. You are the majority shareholder of Stark Industries and you need to be at the first board meeting since your father’s death. You are his son, Anthony -”

“No,” Tony snapped and sounded in control of himself for the first time. “I’m not. He made that clear a thousand times that I wasn’t worthy of his name. So I’m not dancing to his bidding.”

She took a deep breath and moved herself to ensure he was staring right at her. She dropped her voice to a deadly, clipped tone. “There are 145,283 employees that work for you, Anthony. They no longer work for Howard. As of two months ago and thanks to that man with the metal arm, they work for you. And that doesn’t count your subcontractors or the millions of lives you keep safe with advanced weapons technology or the funding you provide for SHIELD to keep millions more safe. So if Howard’s son doesn’t give a rat’s ass, I would hope to hell that Peggy’s nephew would. I raised you better than this, Anthony, so help me god, and the time for being a petulant child is over. Get up, shower, and put on a suit.”

He scowled at her but started moving.

“Oh,” Peggy added. “I found you a personal assistant. Her name is Virginia and she’s waiting for us at the office.”

It was eight months before he spoke to her again.

“Director Carter, you have a visitor,” her assistant buzzed the phone.

Peggy quickly checked the calendar and saw it was blank. She was ready to respond when she heard a familiar voice in the background of Angela’s intercom and fought to control a smile.

“Oh, she’ll want to see me, I’m her nephew.”

The door to Peggy’s office burst open and Tony entered the room.

“Anthony, your tie is crooked,” she replied, hoping the reprimand would hide her tears of relief.

“Aw, Auntie Pegs, you know I only do it to drive you crazy,” he smirked and let her draw him into a hug.

“Don’t stay away so long again, boy,” she whispered into his ear.

“I had to find myself, took longer than I thought it would,” he replied and pulled back from the embrace. He gave her a soft kiss on her cheek. She indicated they should sit on the loveseat in the corner of her office and she told Angela to hold all her calls.

“Where did you find yourself?” She enquired.

“In the lab,” Tony grinned. “Where I should have looked first.”

“Well,” Peggy snorted, “you were quite preoccupied with finding it in the bottom of a bottle of Glenfiddich for a while.”

He blushed slightly and worried his bottom lip. “Pepper doesn’t trust Obie - something about a vibe or some other nonsense, and I have no idea how to run a business. I do know how to build things.”

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small device.

“It’s a portable air filter. I read some reports the EPA put out in the late '80s and we have a real issue with carbon dioxide on this planet, so I thought we could start a small green division to do some environmental shit alongside all the weapons and what not and I can do all this but I can’t run the business so I was wondering if you felt like retiring from SHIELD and running this thing for me?”

Peggy was silent for a few moments as she mentally flipped through all the protests she had - she had been a public servant her entire life and what did she know about commerce - before she looked at the earnest eyes of the best man she knew.

“Why, yes, Anthony, I believe that would be amenable.”

Years and decades passed and life settled into rhythms of normalcy. Sharon rose in the ranks of the intelligence apparatus, Hope took more and more after her mother than her father, and Peggy finally got to see Shuri’s home country - after signing more NDAs than she had ever fathomed were possible.

When Margaret Carter retired as CEO of Stark Industries in 2005, she had taken the company from primarily a weapons manufacturer to a technology company. They were pioneers in green technology, as well as personalized health care devices. Their only limits, stockholders agreed, were those found in Tony Stark’s imagination.

She named Tony as CEO, which most people thought was a mistake - the boy was an inventor, not a businessman - but she assured the world that her nephew was up to the task.

He was and he wasn’t - just like most things in life. But this isn’t Tony’s story, so that is for another time.

By early 2006, the warning signs of memory slippage that had heralded Peggy’s decision to retire had accelerated enough that Tony and Sharon started having hard conversations. “It’s getting bad,” Tony croaked to Sharon, his voice thick with unshed tears. “It’s been about two weeks since she called me Tony.”

“She thinks I’m my mom,” Sharon admitted quietly. “And the doctors say the scans aren’t promising.”

“Goddamnit,” Tony swore. “The brave and brilliant Margaret Carter brought down by her own brain.”

Sharon hiccuped through her tears and handed a file to Pepper. “Her affairs are in order. I think she knew this was coming and she has enough to put her in a facility -”

“Fuck a facility, I’ll hire in-home care,” Tony snapped.

“I don’t think she wants in-home care,” Pepper said calmly as she flipped through the papers. “She picked the facility, Tony. She has a room reserved at Sunrise Home in Brooklyn as soon as you and Sharon think it’s time.”

“Why does Sunrise Home sound familiar?”

Pepper started laughing. “Because your aunt has been one step ahead of you for your entire life.”

Tony snatched the paper out of her hand and read:

_Anthony -_

_Ten years ago, we discussed buying a lot in Brooklyn that had come up for auction and we created the Carter Memory Care Trust. You see, I had some of that genetic testing business done and found I had all the markers for Alzheimers and got to work making sure everything was in order._

_The land we purchased was the block where Steven and James grew up. While we were all far too young to worry about growing old when we were friends, I know those boys would want to make sure people they loved were taken care of. I so wish you could have known them. The three of you are the finest men I have known in my life._

_With the help of the endowment and the trust - which has been steadily growing for ten years - we have been able to create a memory care and research center in Red Hook that is quietly producing some of the best possible solutions to this thing that is eating my brain. I called it Sunrise Home, after the fact that sunrise is my favorite time of day. It is there I want to live - I have a room ready for me when you and Sharon decide I am no longer safe on my own. Upon my death, I want my brain to be donated to the center so that they can learn from it._

_My life has been about saving people from forces outside themselves. I suppose my death could be about saving people from forces inside themselves._

_Never doubt that you are my best boy, Anthony, and I am so proud to be your Aunt Pegs._

Tony looked up at the two women who knew him best and smiled through the tears running down his face. “Then I say it’s time.”

They both nodded, and all cried together, and arrangements were made. For nearly a decade, the good days were more frequent than the bad ones. Peggy was present to meet Steve again, as well as to help them solve some missing pieces of the Winter Soldier puzzle. However, as 2015 turned into 2016, more often than not, she forgot that Steve was a resurrected super soldier instead of a freshly minted one. (And oh boooyyy were Tony and Steve glad that ‘cryo chamber’ and ‘deprogramming’ were not ever part of her vocabulary. Bucky was just sad she didn't know him when he was finally able to visit.) 

Tony and Steve were both by her side when she died - quietly and unobtrusively, but leaving an impact larger than the English language could encompass. Fitting for a woman who changed the world several times over before most people even knew her name.

Tony sent out messages to all the friends who had been parented by Peggy over the years - _I need pallbearers_ , it said - and the responses flooded quickly. The small ceremony Peggy had requested soon ballooned out of even Tony’s control. The President wanted Peggy to lie in State at the U.S. Capitol so the public could pay their respects and Pepper started getting requests to televise the ceremony.

_“She’d hate this fuss,” Steve said one evening as he, Bucky, Tony, and Sharon were planning the ceremony._

_“She would,” Sharon confirmed. “But she’d also understand that letting us all say goodbye is her final duty.”_

Sharon gave the first eulogy, followed by some Senator that Pepper swore was appropriate, and then SI’s current President of the Board.

The YouTube video that went viral, however, came from Tony.

“My parents,” Tony started, “had no idea what they were doing.” The crowd laughed and he flashed a smile. “No, I don’t mean like most parents don’t know what they’re doing, I mean, like they really had no clue. I know that none of this is in any of the official company statements, but for me to tell you about Aunt Pegs, you gotta know about Howard and Maria.

“I’m sure they loved me and there are memories of my childhood that have both them and happiness in the same frame. My mother teaching me how to play piano, my father and I tinkering in his workshop. But by the time we hit my 8th birthday, the only person who shared the happy memories was Aunt Peg. See, she and my dad had been army buddies. All that about Rebirth and whatnot that you learn in school was true. She was one of my dad’s groomspeople and she was the first person to hold me when I was born and she assigned herself the role of my godmother before my parents could even think about something different.

“But what we’ve never really talked about, my family out to the public, was that Margaret Elizabeth Carter raised me. She had some help from Edwin and Ana Jarvis, but after their deaths when I was 10, it was Aunt Peg. I didn’t listen all the time,” he confessed to chuckles. “But all my best lessons came from her.”

“She taught me life things, like how to pick your friends, and what to give someone on the first date. She was my first phone call when sometime was confusing or overwhelming and the times I didn’t call her were when life went completely off the rails. She taught me how to use my incredible privilege to create a better world and challenged me when she thought I was being too lazy about it. She cheered every single one of my accomplishments - even the ones I thought were inconsequential - and refused to let me be defined by them.

“‘I love you, Anthony’, she’d tell me. ‘I have loved you since you first turned your eyes on me and I will love you until mine close forever and beyond. I do not care what letters come after your name or what patents you hold. I care that you are you.’”

Tony took a breath and made eye contact with Hope, who nodded quietly.

“But what is even more remarkable than raising me is that Peggy raised hundreds of other poorly parented children of privilege over the years. A lot of them are here, but even more aren’t. Her house was our safe place to be humans, to ask questions and not worry about consequences. None of us were important in that house, but we were all loved to distraction. I cannot imagine who I’d be or what this world would look like if Aunt Peg hadn’t stepped into all of our lives and kicked our asses, but it would probably involve a lot more trauma for all of us.

“I asked her once why she never had children of her own and - in her incredibly pragmatic tone that let me know I was asking something ridiculous - she replied that she never wanted them. She had far more important things to do than staying home and raising children, she informed me with a perfectly arched eyebrow and reminded me what the world she grew up in was like. She talked to me about marriage and how she saw it as a prison not a partnership and there were only two people who had ever changed her mind about that and she lost them both.

“When I asked her why - if she never wanted children - she opened her home to so many idiot teenagers and she smiled. ‘You were in front of me, and you needed to be loved. I had no idea how to raise any of you, but I had a fair idea of how to love you, so I did that. It all turned out to be a bonus that you all chose to love me back’.”

Tony cleared his throat. “And love her back we did and we do. And not just the waifs of Aunt Peggy’s Home for the Poorly Parented,” he chuckled, “but so many of us. Love to Aunt Peggy was pragmatic - were you clothed, fed, watered? Did you know you were safe? Were your dreams supported? Did you need her to kill the person who hurt you or did you want to fight the battle yourself? All the best bits of me are there because Margaret Carter chose to love me and I will miss her with every breath for the rest of my days.”

As he stepped back he saw Hope stand, and then Sharon, and then the Rockafeller twins, and Gloria Vanderbilt’s boy and his husband, and soon nearly ½ of the sanctuary was standing and Tony gave up trying to hold back the tears. The rector clasped Tony on the shoulder and said she’d take it from there and Tony was relieved he could just sit now.

With Rhodey on one side and Pepper on the other, and surrounded by the rest of his family, Tony said his thanks and goodbyes to the woman who chose him first, so that he could learn to choose others.

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on [Twitter](http://www.twitter.com/betheflame1) or [Tumblr](http://betheflame.tumblr.com) for more on these yahoos. You can also submit prompts and cajole me into writing faster - it usually works. If you're on Discord, I'm definitely there, too, and probably hanging in the [Stony](https://discord.gg/z5WSqbS) or [Stuckony](https://discord.gg/jtXcc3n) servers.


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